Sunday, February 28, 2010

Okay, to celebrate Lemming Monster's first 100 follower giveaway! I'm so surprised by this, really. I started this blog because I'd pretty much done everything but put up a blog, and I'd never intended to make it anything other than just a record for myself. I'm glad you guys come around--it means that in some way, I'm helpful. Or that I give you lemmings. Whatever the case, I'm touched. <3

So! Down to business:

One lucky winner of my giveaway will receive
1) The blush jelly set that I spent ages talking about
2) Essie Outrageous Orange
3) China Glaze Outta Bounds
4) Nubar NuNails Nail Strengthener
And a couple of minis and bits and pieces that I find appropriate.

Yes, they are all colors! (Except the NuNails.) Colors are all I feel like wearing lately; I'm sick of winter humdrums. Also, my four nail polish colors I'm allowed for Lent. Gah. You get to wear them for me.

(Sorry, guys, pictures will come up later. Okay, okay, I have one:)

You have until March 9th, 2010 at 12 PM to enter the giveaway.

In order to enter, you:
1. Must be a follower.
2. Must leave a comment below with your e-mail address. I need to contact y'all somehow.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

I am six followers away from hosting my first giveaway. Six. It will be epic. I promise. It's taking up quite a bit of space on my bookshelf, so please let me get rid of these before I swatch them or decide to keep backups, or something!

Thursday, February 25, 2010

So I get to wear whatever polish I want. Because it is, after all, a birthday and because I'll be watching Kooza today (and so I'm not completely behind on the times), I decided to wear OPI Mad as a Hatter over my previous manicure, Butter London's Billy No Mates.

And then this happened:

It just looked really good alternating like that. :)

MAAH (if you didn't know) is a limited edition OPI from the Alice in Wonderland promotion series. It's a clear polish diffused with multicolored glitter--primarily silver and purple, with green, orange, and gold mixed in, I think. It's not ridiculously shiny. I own more glitters that are far more sparkly than this one, but I enjoy it. I think part of the reason why it looks that way is because the glint given off by the polish is entirely silver... not multi-colored.

One blurry, one side-clear: that was about as non-insane as my camera went when it was MAAH.

It's opaque in three thin coats, two if the way you coat is slightly thicker. I also got better glitter distribution the flatter I laid the brush against the nail. Application is... okay, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not too wild about the OPI pro-wide brush, but my nails are insanely tiny.

I like how from far off, it looks like I've used some kind of silver-purple against Billy No Mates (a polish I like the more I use it... funny, cause I hated its guts before but I quite like it now). : )

Admittedly, it also reminds me of the paper topic that I'm writing about right now, which is due tomorrow...

Oh, one last thing: two coats of topcoat for good gloss. Otherwise, your polish remains gritty.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

I wasn't originally going to post today, but it occurred to me that posting a picture of an NOTD I wore maybe five days ago would be a nice break from all the stuff I'm doing lately. Luckily I've managed to finish some kind of coherent outline of a paper due Friday, but I still have a bunch of other things to do. I don't want to think about them yet.

You've seen an accent-finger image of this, but not a full swatch. I bought it on a whim because I'm crazy-obsessed with night sky polishes (please please please please please OH PLEASE may I have Jessica Twilight? Or Essie SSN. Or Chanel Ciel de Nuit. or Maybelline twinkle twinkle. Or. Or. Or. etc.) so I settled with this one. Five dollars is a lot for a mini, by the way--good for the polish, because I quite like it anyway. This picture was two coats, in the sun.

Shade.

In truth it looks like a sparser version of my franken, which was chock-full of assorted silver glitter (and, by the way, for some reason all the glitter disintegrated. This scares me.) but had a similar layering effect, where the glitter that's resting on top of a coat looks silver and all the rest become progressively bluer. It adds depth, which I like. I also liked the brush, which is flat and slightly stiffer than most nail polish brushes, and thus very very easy to control. I'm not fond of the squareness of its shape, but it bends to curve easily and I had no application problems.

Here's a thumb shot. It shows my interest in this color best, I think. :)

Blue Sapphire is one of the four polishes I'm allowing myself to use until Easter, but I imagine that it'll disappear quite soon--two coats was somewhat streaky (you can see the color disparity in the first picture). It needs three... once I put it on again (which will be soon) I'll take pictures of the three-coater and make comparisons.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

So I had like two other manicures planned for the Venus Creatures thingie I was doing, but never did them. And I had a Mardi Gras manicure, and never actually took pictures of that, either. I'm sorry, guys. Truly I am.

(Shade.)

Today's NOTD is ridiculously difficult to capture: Party Animal is a deep dark merlot-colored jelly with what I want to say is pink microglitter, but is actually probably silver encased in the polish. Whatever, it's pretty. XD It's what I wanted my franken to be, and I love how understated and elegant it is. It takes two coats.

(closer up.)

Please click for a better idea of what the polish looks like, etc.

(with slow-synchro flash, outdoors, in sunlight)

Far off. You can't really see the glitz in this picture, but it's there--it flashes in sunlight, but looks like a straight-up vampy jelly indoors.

I like it, it applies perfectly, it's pretty, etc., but I do have one complaint.

I wore this right before I went to bed, woke up, took a shower, and my thumbnail chipped. I am also already getting tipwear--NOT shrinkage--from wearing this polish. It's been less than a day. Luckily I spend quite a bit of time on nail maintenance and I polish frequently, but I imagine that this would be the primary reason why most people wouldn't find Party Animal too awesome. D:

That said, I have basically two swatches up for you before I do something um, interesting. For Lent I gave up my varieties of nail polish. During the forty days up till Easter, birthday excepted, I am to use four colors only. No exceptions. Except my birthday.

Since I do have a blog to maintain, I'm expecting to throw in a LOT of nail art. A LOT. (If I don't, you have every right to yell at me.) Also, what do you think? Should frankening with the four bottles be allowed, or no?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

"I think I may say now that I lived like a queen, or if you will have me confess that my condition still had the reproach of a whore, I may say, I was sure, the queen of whores....

... for no woman was ever more valued or more caressed by a person of such quality, only in the station of a mistress.

I had, indeed, one deficiency which women in such circumstances seldom are chargeable with, namely, I craved nothing of him."

(A more traditional Valentine's Day NOTD this time around: two coats each of OPI Indi-a Mood for Love, index and ring garnished with ChG Five Golden Rings, and ring with a gold lace rubon. All of them are lovely polishes <3)

This is two coats of Blind Love. I heart it so bad; it's a wonderfully shiny not-silver-nor-gold. Great application. Good wear: this is photographed on two and a half days, really. :) I did ding the manicure in various places, though. Sorry about that.

And I promise this is the only boring manicure out of the ones I've planned!

Monday, February 8, 2010

(It's valentine's week for the nail board, and although I don't post much on there I decided to participate.)

Come night, come Romeo; come, thou day in night, For thou wilt lie upon the wings of nightWhiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-browed night,Give me my Romeo, and when I shall dieTake him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightand pay no worship to the garish sun.(III.ii. 17-25)

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Okay, I have serious issues trying to take a picture that's not only color accurate, but also epic and beautiful and cause angels to dance around your vision.

Why? Mostly because I have a huge gigantic fling with Vampy Varnish (the polish, not the blog, although the blog is quite awesome too). It's beautiful. Let me just show you, since I don't really have words:

......

Um, what?Oh, it's a black jelly with an emerald green and gold microglitter interspersed into it, and it's awesome. It looks like the cosmos implanted itself on my fingernails. It took three thin coats, but I'd assume most people would get away with two. It's also very very very shiny, but apparently there is no sun from where I usually take pictures (when I walked out today, though, BAM. the stars came to life. One big glittering, shimmery, shiny black-and-green awesome). Dried gritty, but one coat of seche vite will do! (Except it shrank from the edge of my tips for the first time; what the hell?)

Also also, I experienced no problem with glooping or thick polish at the beginning of my manicure, but by the time I hit the second hand, application was a nightmare. I'm surprised at that; one would think that it wouldn't dry out so quickly--either way, thinner solves the problem. :)

I should probably work on my paper, but how much do you want to bet I'll just sit there staring at my nails half the time? I wouldn't.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Lucky is the mood today with our last Blush mini (props, nail polish naming company, for not taking the easy way out and naming it Envy like 103148231091 other green polishes) and it is the perfect color of sour apple candy. Like most of the set, it's a jelly three-coater, but three coats gets this one fully opaque.

Here's a picture of it in sunlight and far off:

Sunlight.

Further off, indoors.

I'm surprised with how much I like this one, like the orange. It's not a color I'd normally wear, but it looks kind of good, don't you think? (Off topic, but I just put Mint Candy Apple on my toes and I have never seen such a terrible case of lobster feet as I see now. I guess that means I'm warm-toned? Funny how nail polish can teach you what makeup cannot. (I'm still a winter, though.)) It also looks juicy, but more in a candy kind of way than the orange, which reminded me of a pulp in a tangerine. This one just makes me want Jolly Ranchers.

I think that this set is a pretty good one! I knew what I liked in polish when I first started out--cool colors, the occasional red, pink, nude--but this makes me branch out a bit and tentatively poke the world of brights. And so far, so good; there isn't anything I hate yet except the sheer yellow that I'll probably end up frankening with. I can't imagine reaching often for the brights, but they'll be a fun alternative at some point during the spring and summer. And during dreary old days in the rain. :) So, yes. Good set, but I'm all color and jellied out. Do you know what that means?